1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

was no reluctance on their part to agree to do that.
We started off on, I think, a very sound foundation. That visit from the delegation from
the Rada, the parliament, which took place in August, just before I left for Ukraine, was
very helpful, to me, because it gave me the grounds to discuss what I thought needed to
be done here in Washington in the way of framing policies, and to frame what I would
intend to do. This is a very important matter. Ukraine was a new state still in formation.
Roman Popadiuk who was our first ambassador under Bush, was there only for six
months. The Ukrainian government was not in shape to put itself together without
assistance and what Ukrainians called “moral support.” Our government didn't yet have
the power after the election, certainly, to do anything official.
We were starting from scratch, really, as a matter of policy. So, I was shaping policy as
much as anyone because no one knew what to do. No one had any baseline to work there,
and there was no bureaucracy on these matters, because you're starting tabula rasa (blank
slate).
Q: Now, did Strobe Talbott have any strong feelings on this?
MILLER: He had very strong feelings on the nuclear question. He was correctly skeptical
about the viability of many of the new states, and was definitely not sure about where
Ukraine would go, whether it would survive, although he expressed the view that it could.
The policy was, from the outset, at least as long as I was involved was called two track.
We would assist both Russia and Ukraine to develop as democratic, free market nations
and hope that they would be integrated into the West, particularly Ukraine.
Q: I would think that, looking at it purely in self interest, that to keep Ukraine out of too
close of embrace or being part of Russia would be of great advantage to us, because it
essentially would mean that, without Ukraine there and it's 40 million people and it's
land mass, it just means that Russia is not going to be the powerhouse that it was before.
MILLER: Well, that was the rubric that was laid down and accepted by many political
analysts. This rubric was formulated and laid down by Brzezinski. This was his thesis,
and it was held by others, but the great question about it was, was this – and would it be
viable? Would the differences between Ukrainian-speaking portions, the West and the
East, divided by the Dnipro, split the nation? Would the Crimea revolt? Would the
Russians balk on agreements to division of assets such as the Black Sea Fleet? These
were all unknowns, great doubts, and we didn't know the new players particularly from
Ukraine.
No one in the Clinton Administration knew the players in Ukraine's new government, and
those few that they had met, they didn't like. They thought they were equivocators. They
believed they couldn't be trusted to hold their word, which really meant they didn't agree
with them, and they were stubborn and difficult and awkward and unpracticed, which is
quite understandable. Kravchuk, the president, was a second or third-rank nomenklatura
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